Dubai is relatively strict about immigration. In order to obtain a residence visa, you have to fall into certain categories. Hundreds of thousands of people are here as construction laborers, housemaids, and then there are the prostitutes. They don’t give them visas. So the hundreds of Russian, Filipina and African women who make a living as prostitutes in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, enter the UAE on tourist visas, which can be extended once or twice, but then they have to leave the country for at least a month. So they go to a group of three islands, The Tunbs and Abu Musa, located in the Straits of Hormuz, islands whose ownership is in dispute. The United Arab Emirates claims them, but they’re right next to Iran, and Iran is currently occupying them. So when a boatload of prostitutes comes to the Islands, they get their passports stamped as having entered Iran. And then they hang out there on that island for a month.

Of course, I only know this because a guy told me. He’s the kind of guy who knows the real scoop, the stuff they don’t print in papers. Now you know it, too.

So, as the story goes, these islands are the sole domain of various fallen women, with no men around to bother or amuse them except for a handful of Iranian customs officials and a few boat pilots. Sounds like a story from a 1960’s men’s magazine. “I Was Stranded on the Island of Women.”

There is a less comic aspect to the islands, and that is their strategic value in any attempt by Iran to close the Straits of Homuz  to shipping. If this were to happen, the United States would have to use force to keep the lanes open. It’s a narrow stretch of ocean,  and both day and night it’s wall-to-wall oil tankers.  Maybe the prostitutes keep busy by waving at the oil tankers  floating by, and counting the days until they can go back to work.

But Hollywood film scouts take note: this story has everything. Sex, current events, exotic locations, and guns.